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THE MAGIC BULLET
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ently back from the dye factory near by came that benzopurpurin color, with the sulfo-groups properly stuck onto it, "changed a little."

Under the skin of two white mice Shiga shot the evil trypanosomes of the mal de Caderas. A day passes. Two days go by. The eyes of those mice begin to stick shut with the mucilage of doom, their hair stands up straight with their dread of destruction—one day more and it will be all over with both of those mice. . . . But wait! Under the skin of one of those two mice Shiga sends a shot of that red dye—changed a little. Ehrlich watches, paces, mutters, gesticulates, shoots his cuffs. In a few minutes the ears of that mouse turn red, the white of his nearly eyes turn pinker than the pink of his albino pupils. That day is a day of fate for Paul Ehrlich, it is the day the god of chance is good, for, like snows before the sun of April, so those fell trypanosomes melt out of the blood of that mouse!

Away they go, shot down by the magic bullet, till the last one has perished. And the mouse? His eyes open. He snouts in the shavings in the booto of his cage and sniffs at the pitiful little body of his dead companion, the untreated one.

He is the first one of all mice to fail to die from the attack of the trypanosome.

Paul Ehrlich, by the grace of persistence, chance, God, and a dye called "Trypan Red" (its real chemical name would stretch across this page!) has saved him! How that encouraged this already too courageous man! "I have a dye to cure a mouse—I shall find one to save a million men," so dreamed that confident German Jew.

But not at once, alas and alas. With gruesome diligence Shiga shot in that trypan red, and some mice got better but others got worse. One, seemingly to be cured, would frisk about its cage, and then, after sixty days (!) would turn up seedy in the morning. Snip! went an end of its tail and the skillful Shiga would call Paul Ehrlich to see its blood matted with a writhing smarm of the fell trypanosomes of the mal de Caderas. Terrible beast are trypanosomes, sly, tough, as all despicable